Chapter 9: Anti-branding

How explain a negative brand relationship and the consequences?

causes:

• Negative past experiences

• symbolic incongruity

• Ideological incompatibility

Consequences:

• Brand avoidance

• négative WOM

• brand retaliation

What are the 3 types of brand repulsion?

• Brand anti-hegemony: the brand is too powerful

• anti marketing: marketing is deceptive, they think that it is manipulation

• anti-fandom: people don’t want be considered as a stupid fandom

What is the definition of antibranding?

term that represents various negative feelings and behaviors targeted at specific brands, often with a LT commitment to brand rejection and anti-consumption

Behaviour: boycott, opposition, anti BC participation, rejection, avoidance

Emotion: dislike, hate

What are the 4 emotions related to a brand?

• love - liking

• hate - dislike

What are the 3 types of hate?

1) disgust: strong feeling, repulsion and disgust

2) contempt: diminution, devaluation of the brand

3) anger: negative passion

What are the 4 types of anti-community behavior?

1) Anti brand community participation

2) collective boycott bad buzz

3) brand avoidance rejection/ switching

4) individual boycott

What is anti-branding community?

Groupings of consumer activists gathered around the common aversion for a brand

What is brand avoidance?

Incidents in which consumers deliberately choose to reject a brand and there is no guarantee that the consumption relationship will resume in the future. We are not sure that they will consume again

What is collective boycott?

a form of temporary and collective rejection of a brand. Consumers boycotting brand usually hope to resume relationship with the brand once their requests have been granted

What are the sources of knowledge that inform the brand reputation?

• own experiences

• other’s experiences

• media

• firm itself

What is brand reputation and key dimension?

• perception and evaluation

• time perspective

• stakeholder based

• performance and competitiveness

• sum of image

However a brand can have a negative reputation and a positive image

Why anti branding matters?

→ Negative actions have more power than positive actions, we pay more attention to negative than positive

→ online consumers are more active and participative, they have more opportunities to say it

→ anti branding can have broad reputation

What are the strategies to do?

• be humble

• listen

• act immediately

• if wrong criticism, correct the people

• If true apologize

• do SEO, send positive thing, aim to drown out negative articles with positive ones

• communicate

• care

• be prepared

• sometimes,… nothing